


Lodestar

by legete



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: 1940s, Brooklyn, Bucky Barnes Feels, Implied Torture, Introspection, M/M, Prisoner of War, Unresolved Sexual Tension, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-26
Updated: 2013-01-26
Packaged: 2017-11-26 23:29:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/655572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/legete/pseuds/legete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It says something about him, as a soldier and as a man, that his most pressing concern is Steve refusing to play “when the war is over” with them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lodestar

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kikibug13](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kikibug13/gifts).
  * Translation into 中文 available: [【翻译】Lodestar 北极星 （legete 原作）](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2712818) by [RoseDeLumiere](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseDeLumiere/pseuds/RoseDeLumiere)



> This is a (very, very late) gift for kikibug13, who had the extreme misfortune to be assigned to me for the Steve/Bucky Holiday Exchange over on LJ. At some point, I'm sure "better late than never" ceases to apply, but I hope we haven't quite reached that yet. I hope you enjoy, despite the lateness and the rambliness and the, uh. Everythingness.
> 
> All my thanks to zekkass, who not only gave this a quick look-over but also cheered me on through all of my bouts of insecurity.

It says something about him, as a soldier and as a man, that his most pressing concern is Steve refusing to play “when the war is over” with them.

In the dark, in the cold, in the mud or the rain or the sticky, relentless heat, the other six of them play. Dernier has his father’s farm to rebuild. Jones wants to go back into academics. Morita’s holding onto a few ideas for a shop, Falsworth’s got that whole lordship thing, and Dugan has half a dozen bars in Boston that are sorely missing his patronage. Bucky, he wants to see the Grand Canyon. That’s what he tells the others. He wants to see the greatest wonder America has to offer.

Truth is, though, sometimes he thinks he’s already seen it. He thinks he might be watching it through the scope of his rifle right now.

He shifts on the tree branch, moves for the first time in an hour, and his muscles scream in protest. He’s gone from point to back-up in the course of the morning, watching the top of the ridge for any sign of enemy troops. Their intel said a patrol was supposed to come through, but so far they’re no-shows. Now Steve’s ranging out to the left with Jones and Dernier while Falsworth’s got the right with Morita and Dugan, crawling their way slow and inexorable up the ridge, blue and brown against snow. He trains his scope back on the star in the middle of the shield cinched to Steve’s back, absently following its progress upward while his dominant eye keeps watching for any other signs of movement.

Before the war, he had never stopped moving--to stop, in those days, when he was poor and small in a city full of the poor and the small, was as good as death. He'd fought hard for every scrap he got for twenty-four years, and twice as hard for the last ten of those because it wasn't just himself he had to look after. That’d all changed when he got drafted, when Uncle Sam pulled his name from the hat and ruined his whole fucking life.

He remembers sitting on the stoop of their apartment building, Steve clutching the paper in his thin artist’s hands. It’d been a bright day, the kind that used to give Steve bad sunburns if he was out too long, and Bucky had stared at the curve of Steve’s neck as he read, the fine hairs at his nape turned golden in the light, the bones of his spine resting uneasily beneath reddening skin. For a moment, a brief moment, he’d made up his mind to run. He’d take Steve and run, catch a train westward, change their names and find someone to give him a little work for food and Steve’s medicines. He’d made up his mind to cut off his goddamn hand if it meant not leaving Steve behind to fend for himself on his meager WPA paychecks. Then Steve had jerked, looked up at him suddenly, fear and surprise and _jealousy_ in his eyes, in the bow of his open mouth, and Bucky had known that he was gonna end up reporting after all.

Steve had stood with him on the platform as the train rolled in, the one that would take him to Camp Lehigh. Around them people had been kissing each other, men and women, men and women, big sweeping shows and shy brushes against cheeks and presses that were almost obscene in their intimacy. Steve had been in the corner of his eye, and he’d stolen glances at him, stolen them because he couldn’t get them any honest way. Steve’s hunched shoulders had been pulled back straight, the breeze from the slowing train making his tie flap over one. He’d insisted on dressing up, putting on his Sunday clothes to see Bucky off, and in that moment Bucky had wanted to kiss him like the other guys were kissing their companions, wanted to be one of the obscene couples embarrassing the others with the injustice of pulling them apart for the sake of some far-off war. That’d scared him more than the train, more than going up against Nazis, so he’d just stood there with his heart in his mouth, beating so fast it made him sick. Before he’d known it, the moment had been gone, and Steve had been just a shrinking figure on a shrinking platform, and Bucky had been just as much of a coward as he’d ever been.

Training had been a nightmare at first, like he’d expected. He’d lost ten pounds before starting to put muscle weight back on, couldn’t get enough air in the muggy Virginia spring, and went to bed every night feeling like he’d come out the worse in a streetfight. He’d found out he was better with a rifle than any born-and-bred Brooklyn boy had a right to be, though, and before the end, he’d been pulled out for on-the-fly training for sergeant. Too many troops and not enough NCOs over there, he’d been told. The pay was better, and that’d been all he cared about--having enough to send back to Steve in exchange for the letters filled with graphite sketches of their neighborhood. He’d lie in bed those hot nights, riffling through them and telling himself that when he got back, he’d say something, something, anything.

He hadn’t. He had put it off and put it off until he had his orders, and then the expo had been a disaster. He lost his last night to Steve’s bullheadedness and his own bruised ego, and then morning had broken over an unfamiliar apartment and an unfamiliar body next to him, and Steve had not been there to see him off that time.

A brief staging in England and he’d been off to the battlefront with the rest of the 107th. There'd been no letters then, but whether it was delay due to the war or Steve simply wasn't writing them, he couldn't say. Two months into holding the line, he’d had his first run-in with HYDRA--and by all rights, it should’ve been his last. He’d been slave labor for them, locked in a cage with a dozen other men.

He’s still not sure how long he’d been held there. Logically, he does know--there are military records of when the 107th was decimated and when Steve had led them back to Allied territory again. But hard numbers cannot explain what he had experienced when he’d been out of his mind with fever and pain. The rescue where they were finally all pulled out of the base outside of Azzano--it hadn’t been the first time he’d seen Steve come for him, not by far. Name, rank, and serial number, that was standard procedure. But they’d broken his ribs when he’d still been working on the factory floor, kicked them in until every inhale and exhale was a sharp grind of pain, and the minute they’d pinned him down in a lab, taken away the last bit of fight he’d had in him, he’d succumbed to the sickness he’d been fighting off with every blood-damp breath.

After that he’d dreamt in fitful bursts--dreamt of his mother, of the nuns at the orphanage, of Steve with his lungs rattling in his chest. He’d looked for the menthol ointment all over their neighborhood, but all of the buildings were numbered the same, 32557241, and he’d known somehow that wasn’t right, there were too many digits, and Steve’s wheezing had followed impossibly close as he drifted from doorway to doorway.

Every time he’d surface all he could think of was pain and cold. His feet were ice inside his boots; his arms ached with blown blood vessels. There had always been some face swimming above him, muttering in German too fast and too natural for him to follow. Sometimes he’d try to hang on, but it was no better up there than it was below, and inevitably he’d lose himself again.

Finally, he’d dreamt that Polaris had fallen from the sky. He’d never really seen a falling star, not until Europe, not until there was a true nighttime rather than the uneasy all-hours glow of New York City. But strapped to that table, he’d dreamt of that bright light bearing down on him, headed for his heart, his heart, and around him the HYDRA camp burned. He'd heard the screams of their men and the sound of metal and stone wrenching apart; he’d seen them run from the light as roaches do. Heat flared in his veins, set his blood to boiling, chased away the bone-deep chill that had set in with his fever his first week of capture and lingered. It burned away his bonds and he ran, light at his back, light on his face, chasing a star and trusting it was taking him home.

He had come to in the forest, the threadbare fabric at his knees soaking up cold moisture from the loam as he vomited barely-digested chocolate. There had been a hand on his back and a stretch of warmth at his side, and when he’d wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, he’d turned to find Steve crouching there next to him.

“Too rich,” Steve had said, a familiar voice in an unfamiliar body. “I’m sorry, I should’ve realized.”

He’d remembered then, remembered _what happened to you_ and _I joined the army._ It had sunk in for the first time that it wasn’t a dream, that Steve--Steve Rogers, who never could climb the stairs to their apartment without gasping like a dying man--had come for him, had come for all of them. It had been too much at the time; his mind couldn’t process it any more than his body had handled the chocolate. 

Steve, for his part, had begun to fret about the November cold, making Bucky’s body shake like that. 

They’d always been best at the kind lies.

It might not’ve been the cold then, but it is now. It’s settled so thoroughly into him that he’s trembling, only his locked muscles keeping him from full-on shivers. Reluctantly, he adjusts the rifle so he can no longer see Steve through the scope. God help him if he accidentally twitches on the trigger. Hell, he doesn’t know if God still helps men like him, but Steve shouldn’t be the one to pay the price.

He worries sometimes that Steve doesn’t expect to make it home. He worries sometimes that Steve isn’t just willing to lay down his life; he worries sometimes that Steve plans on it. Maybe that’s extreme, maybe it’s unkind. He has no proof, nothing but the way that Steve throws his whole self into every single mission, leaps in front of enemy fire, runs straight into the lions’ den, swallowed by gloom until all they can see is the star, flashing faint and far away. And christ almighty, don’t they follow him? The six of them, who all have plans, who all want something after this is over, they follow him, follow that faint and far away star into hell. They don’t even look at each other, because to look at each other is to remember that there’s a home somewhere that they need to get back to. Instead they just lock eyes on Steve and keep running, ignoring exhaustion and fear and common sense, and somehow he always leads them through.

All he wants these days--apart from decent food and dry clothes and a sense of safety--is to hear Steve say he has plans for when they win this. In their bedrolls at night, they pull out their dreams and their hopes, worry-stones worn smooth and familiar over the months behind enemy lines, polish them up, release them into the air. Farms and bars and canyons spoken aloud; duty and friendship and desperate longing held back. And every time, Steve stays silent. He smiles, he comments, but he never offers more than a shrugged _I dunno_ of his own. Maybe he’s embarrassed. Maybe he’s hedging his bets. Bucky’s heard that Carter woman make her vague promises for the future--if Steve doesn’t want him, surely he’s got to want that. Any sane man would want that.

Sometimes Steve meets his eyes when they play; sometimes it looks like he’s waiting for Bucky to say something. Maybe he’s waiting to hear that what Bucky wants isn’t out in the desert; maybe he’s waiting to hear that what Bucky wants lives and breathes Brooklyn, is egg-creams and factories and pastel-dust and the two of them in their undershirts in a tiny fifth-floor apartment. And maybe Steve’s twice the size he was then, and maybe Bucky’s half the man he could’ve been, but that _is_ what he wants. He wants it so bad he can taste it like the iron tang of blood in his mouth. But the uncertainty of what Steve wants gags him, chokes the words out until the only thing he has left is the kind lie, and that is what he always says, and that is what he always closes his eyes against when Steve shifts away from him.

Steve never offers a hope for when the war is over, but Bucky refuses to accept the thought that they won't make it out of this. In some form or another, they'll make it out of this.

Maybe he’ll get everything he thinks he wants. Maybe he'll go back to Brooklyn alone. Maybe he'll follow Steve like the lovesick dog he is, and they'll live in England for the rest of their lives, learn the wrong names for things and buy row houses near each other. Maybe he'll marry a girl, and maybe she'll be a petite blonde with blue eyes and not enough chest. Maybe it'll be another thing they never talk about.

They always draw their plans back afterward, tuck them back inside their chests where they flicker like cheap imitations of stars, weak and barely-warm. But after the cold and the dark all around them, even that burns.

Until the day the war is over, they are the Howling Commandos, ghosts made of Allied hope, purveyors of war whoops and death. They are the head of a subtle spear, _acumen hastae_ writ large across their fates; they are a bunch of mutts laughing their way through shellshock, stumbling along to the pull of a bright needle in an impossible compass. Directions fall away beneath them until there is only north, only north dressed all in blue.

There's a flash of dark uniform on the ridge above Steve. The patrol has finally come.

He exhales slowly and squeezes the trigger. Four hundred and eighty yards away, a man dies.


End file.
